Amazon Web Services to Open Data Centers in South Africa

New AWS Infrastructure Region in the first half of 2020 will enable
customers to run workloads in South Africa and serve end-users across
the African continent with even lower latency

2018年10月25日午前03:00，東部夏時間

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN),
today announced it will open an infrastructure region in South Africa in
the first half of 2020. The new AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region will
consist of three Availability Zones. Currently, AWS provides 55
Availability Zones across 19 infrastructure regions worldwide, with
another 12 Availability Zones across four AWS Regions in Bahrain, Hong
Kong SAR, Sweden, and a second GovCloud Region in the U.S. expected to
come online in the coming months. For more information on AWS’s global
infrastructure, go to: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/.

“Having built the original version of Amazon EC2 in our Cape Town
development center 14 years ago, and with thousands of African companies
using AWS for years, we’ve been able to witness first-hand the technical
talent and potential in Africa,” said Andy Jassy, CEO, Amazon Web
Services, Inc. “Technology has the opportunity to transform lives and
economies across Africa and we’re excited about AWS and the Cloud being
a meaningful part of that transformation.”

The new region is the latest in a series of AWS investments in South
Africa. In 2004, Amazon opened a development center in Cape Town that
focuses on building pioneering networking technologies, next generation
software for customer support, and the technology behind Amazon EC2. AWS
has also built a number of local teams including account managers,
customer services representatives, partner managers, solutions
architects, and more to help customers of all sizes as they move to the
cloud. In 2015, AWS opened an office in Johannesburg, and in 2017
brought the Amazon Global Network to Africa through AWS Direct Connect.
In May of 2018, AWS continued its investment in South Africa, launching
infrastructure points of presence in Cape Town and Johannesburg,
bringing Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Route 53, AWS Shield, and AWS WAF to
the continent and adding to the 138 points of presence AWS has around
the world.

The addition of the AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region will enable
organizations to provide lower latency to end users across Sub-Saharan
Africa and will enable more African organizations to leverage advanced
technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Internet
of Things (IoT), mobile services, and more to drive innovation. Local
AWS customers will also be able to store their data in South Africa with
the assurance that their content will not move without consent, while
those looking to comply with the upcoming Protection of Personal
Information Act (POPIA) will have access to secure infrastructure that
meets the most rigorous international compliance standards.

African organizations already moving to AWS

Organizations across the African continent have been increasingly moving
their applications to AWS. Enterprises such as Absa, Investec,
MedScheme, MiX Telematics, Old Mutual, Pick n Pay, Standard Bank,
Travelstart, and many more are using AWS to drive cost savings,
accelerate innovation, and speed up time-to-market. African startups
choosing AWS as the foundation for their businesses include Aerobotics,
Apex Innovation, Asoriba, BusinessOptics, ColonyHQ, Custos Media, DPO
PayGate, EMS Invirotel, Entersekt, graylink, HealthQ, JourneyApps, JUMO,
Luno, Mukuru, NicheStreem, Parcelninja, Simfy Africa, Zanibal, Zapper,
and Zoona. The African Public Sector, including researchers, museums,
and health sciences organizations, are also choosing AWS. For example,
The National Museums of Kenya (NMK), is using AWS to digitize their most
precious and valuable artifacts, which make up one of the largest
collections of archaeology and paleontology in the world.

Absa, one of the largest and most innovative banks in Africa, welcomes
the news of an AWS Region. “AWS has been Absa’s primary cloud provider
for the past three years. The reduction in latencies that will accompany
their expansion to South Africa will further enable us to scale our
cloud consumption,” said Andy Baker, CIO at Absa. “We no longer deploy
bespoke hardware, SAN storage, or high-cost proprietary database
solutions. Instead, our new tech stack utilizes low cost, fully
automated, logically partitioned, open source software, with real-time
security and application monitoring. AWS’s track record of delivering
enterprise ready and South African regulator-approved services to Absa
has given us confidence to deploy services aimed at further reducing our
operational costs and improving our cyber risk profile.”

Another well-known South African enterprise using AWS for their mission
critical workloads is MiX Telematics, a global provider of fleet
management, driver safety, and vehicle tracking services and solutions.
“We started working with AWS in 2015 and decided to go ‘all-in,’
including migrating our full fleet and mobile asset management stack to
AWS and shutting down our on-premises data centers over a period of 18
months,” said Catherine Lewis, Executive VP (Technology) at MiX
Telematics. “Through moving to AWS, we have been able to speed up
innovation and increase system reliability, while reducing the time to
get new ideas into production from months to minutes. While we already
use AWS globally in Ireland, Australia, and the U.S., an AWS
infrastructure region in Africa will accelerate our innovation even
further, improve our service, and ultimately reduce the costs of
supporting our base of over 700,000 vehicles. We are also in the process
of migrating over 7,000 costly Microsoft SQL Server databases to Amazon
Aurora and Amazon RDS PostgreSQL, and adopting new technologies, such as
AWS’s Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning services, to help
more intelligently manage vehicle efficiency, improve driver safety, and
ultimately enable us to drive greater value for our customers.”

Pick n Pay is one of the largest retailers in Africa, with over 80,000
staff across 1,560 stores, and is moving their eCommerce and data
analytics systems to AWS. “By moving our eCommerce and mobile customer
application to AWS, from our previous managed services model, we
estimate we have saved significantly on our total cost of ownership over
the past year,” said Chris Shortt, General Manager of Information
Services, Pick n Pay. “The relationship, performance, reliability, and
cost savings has been positive and has led us to move our SAP Business
Warehouse systems to certified AWS X1 instances. Selecting AWS
highlights the differentiated, cloud-first thinking they bring to us as
opposed to more traditional, and less agile, service providers. The
scale, security, speed, and customer focused nature of AWS is something
we’ve become accustomed to and look forward to expanding our use of
their services as the South African Region becomes a reality.”

In the startup space, Entersekt, an authentication and mobile
application security company, is leveraging the scalability of AWS to
support world-renowned financial services organizations including Absa,
Capitec Bank, Nedbank, Swisscard, and more. The company is using AWS to
send fully encrypted data from their banking customer’s on-premises
environments to the cloud. This high level of security helps Entersekt’s
customers across 45 countries to secure over 150 million transactions
per month, drastically reducing online and mobile banking and payment
fraud rates. “As a South African headquartered company and long-term
customer, we are proud to be among the first to welcome the news of an
AWS Region,” said Schalk Nolte, CEO of Entersekt. “Our customers are
large financial institutions for whom even minutes of downtime are
unacceptable. They experience significant spikes in transaction volumes
during the course of a month and AWS provides the elasticity and
availability they demand, without having to build, operate, and protect
a system of this kind themselves. AWS has ensured extremely high service
levels even as transactions continue to double every six months. An AWS
infrastructure region in South Africa is great news as it will give us
the opportunity to continue this rapid growth and offer South African
financial institutes localised data control and protection with
increased system performance and reduced latency.”

Another startup using AWS to speed up their work is South African-based
Hyrax Biosciences. Originating from the South African National
Bioinformatics Institute at the University of the Western Cape, Hyrax
Biosciences has developed a technology on AWS called Exatype that
rapidly and accurately tests HIV and tuberculosis drug resistance. “When
we were developing Exatype, we naturally turned to AWS because it allows
us to provide patients with secure, timely, and reliable results. We
knew that with the ability to quickly scale up our technology on AWS,
our solution had the potential to influence the lives of millions of
people,” said Professor Simon Travers, Co-Founder and CEO of Hyrax
Biosciences. “Currently 10 percent of patients on
HIV antiretroviral treatment do not respond to the drugs provided to
them because of drug resistance. The Exatype system solves this problem
by showing clinicians which drugs would be most effective for each
individual patient in order to increase their response and improve
treatment. Traditionally, it can cost as much as $300 to $500 to do a
single resistance test. Now, thanks to AWS, Exatype can do this at a
fraction of the cost. HIV still affects millions of people, so knowing
an AWS Region is coming to South Africa is great news as it will help us
to speed up research and take us a step nearer to ensuring all HIV
positive people get the standard of care they need.”

AWS also has a vibrant ecosystem in South Africa, including AWS Partner
Network (APN) Partners that have built cloud practices and innovative
technology solutions on AWS. APN Consulting and Technology Partners in
South Africa helping customers to migrate to the cloud include Autumn
Leaf, BBD, Dimension Data, EOH, First Distribution, Silicon Overdrive,
Servol Software, Symbiotics, Synthesis Software Technologies, and
others. For the full list of AWS Partner Network members, please visit: https://aws.amazon.com/partners/.

AWS supports South African development

As well as supporting existing customers, AWS is also investing in the
future of the South African technology community, taking part in a
number of philanthropic and charity activities. Amazon supports
organizations such as AfricaTeenGeeks, an NGO that teaches children to
code, Code4CT, a charity set up to inspire and empower young girls by
equipping them with technical skills, DjangoGirls, which introduces
women to coding, and GirlCode, which supports the empowerment of women
through technology. Amazon engineers work with these and other charities
to provide coaching, mentoring, and AWS credits. Amazon also supports
Africa-focused non-profit organization World Reader by donating cloud
technology and Kindle devices, filled with e-books, to tackle illiteracy
in Sub-Saharan Africa. As a result of the support from Amazon, World
Reader has deployed over 27,000 Kindles to 396 schools and 109 libraries
across 16 African countries.

In the education space, AWS supports the Explore Data Science Academy to
educate students on data analytics skills in order to produce the next
generation of data scientists in Africa. AWS is also working with
education institutions in South Africa, such as the University of Cape
Town and Stellenbosch University, to help train the next generation of
cloud professionals through AWS Educate. Another program for higher
education institutes is AWS Academy, which provides AWS-authorized
courses for students to acquire in-demand cloud computing skills. The
program has already attracted the country’s major academic institutions,
including the University of Cape Town, University of Johannesburg, and
Durban University of Technology.

To help grow the next generation of African businesses, AWS works with
the venture capital community as well as accelerators and incubators in
South Africa to provide resources to startups through programs such as
AWS Activate. In Cape Town, AWS works with organizations such as 4Di
Capital, AngelHub Ventures, Crossfin, Knife Capital, LaunchLab, MTN
Solution Space, Mzansi Commons, and Silicon Cape as well as co-working
hubs, such as Workshop17, to provide coaching and mentorship as well as
technical support and resources to help African startups launch their
businesses and go global.

To sign up for an AWS account to prepare for the arrival of the AWS
Africa (Cape Town) Region, visit aws.amazon.com.

About Amazon Web Services

For over 12 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most
comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 125
fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking,
analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet
of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality
(VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and
management from 55 Availability Zones (AZs) within 18 geographic regions
and one Local Region around the world, spanning the U.S., Australia,
Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Korea,
Singapore, and the UK. AWS services are trusted by millions of active
customers around the world—including the fastest-growing startups,
largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—to power their
infrastructure, make them more agile, and lower costs. To learn more
about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.

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